How Israel Encourages Palestinian Extremism

the Editors

December 3, 2012, 6:33 PM EST

Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Israel has good reason to be upset
over the vote last week in the United Nations General Assembly
to grant the Palestinians the status of a nonmember observer
state. As much as we understand Israel’s reaction, however,
that’s no reason for the country to shoot itself in the foot.

In response to the UN resolution, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government said it would seize Palestinian
funds and expand Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory.
Those actions will encourage Palestinian extremism. If one
especially controversial settlement plan comes to fruition, it
will impede a final peace agreement and thereby hurt Israelis as
well as Palestinians.

Proposed by Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate leader of the West
Bank, the UN resolution changed little, if anything,
substantively. Palestine can, with some credence, call itself a
state, but the important issues such as its borders, the status
of Jerusalem and the rights of Palestinian refugees remain to be
negotiated.

On the other hand, politically, the statehood resolution
gave Abbas and his Fatah party a badly needed boost against the
militant group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and has
gained support for its recent rocket attacks on Israel. Now,
Israel threatens to undermine Abbas, first by cutting his purse
strings. The Palestinian Authority that Abbas leads relies for
two-thirds of its domestic revenue on $100 million a month in
taxes that Israel collects from Palestinians and is obligated to
hand over.

By suspending these transfers, Israel will make it hard for
Abbas to pay government salaries. That will rekindle resentments
that Abbas has achieved nothing for the Palestinians, whereas
Hamas, at least, is fighting for their cause. Israel says it
will use the money to pay a $200 million debt to the Israeli
Electric Corp., but the timing for such an action was off.

So was the timing of the settlement announcements, which
also came less than two months before Israeli parliamentary
elections. Most provocatively, Israel said it would begin zoning
and planning for housing units in a West Bank zone called E1.
The tract connects Jerusalem to the Jewish settlement Maaleh
Adumim. If settled by Israelis, E1 would cut off easy access
between the northern and southern halves of the West Bank,
thereby disrupting its economy and society. The Israelis would
be hard-pressed to find Palestinians who would accept a future
state based on such a deformed entity.

The Israelis may eventually drop the E1 plan to deflect
attention from their intention, announced last week, to build
3,000 additional housing units elsewhere in unspecified parts of
the West Bank. Even so, they’ve made Abbas look bad. Weeks
before, he offered to resume peace talks with Israel without
conditions, dropping an earlier demand for a settlement freeze.
The settlement announcements make it politically perilous for
him to stick to that statement.

Abbas is more likely now to focus on forming a unity
government with Hamas. Such discussions will probably go
nowhere, as they have in the past. Still, they will give Hamas
credibility.

Abbas may also consider exploiting the one potentially
serious consequence of the UN resolution: Palestine can attempt
to gain access to the International Criminal Court, where it
might challenge Israel’s actions as an occupying force. Before
the vote, Abbas had professed little interest in such a course,
but Israel is giving him incentives to pursue it.

Netanyahu must figure that Israel, which has learned to
endure international condemnation, could tolerate even that. And
it could. The question is: Must it?